The Web 2.0 enabler: SOA

With all the talk (myself included) about SOA, Web 2.0, Mashups, I’m finding myself struggling to accept the correct paradigm. As Jason Kolb says, SOA is a way of building applications so that they are capable of sharing data. REST and SOAP are both protocols for using the services it contains. Web Services are just an implementation, or wrapper, of those services.

Web 2.0 allows other people or systems to interact with the SOA one builds. Web 2.0 is the idea of opening systems and allowing others to use them. Google opened its system, all kinds of Google Maps mashups resulted. Flickr opened their system, and mashups resulted. Amazon opened its system, and mashups resulted. "Mashup", is exactly what it implies--it mashes together two different systems and creates a brand new application using the two (or three, or four).

Web 2.0 for the enterprise is allowing people to use more than one Web app and/or internal system at the same time. Web 2.0 for the enterprise will happen when IT departments begin wrapping Web services around existing systems, and start making mashups using those. I can just see the sales pipeline overlaid on Google maps from here.

What will be really cool is when standards start emerging and the data from those services wrapped around the internal systems can be shared with partner companies, exposing sensitive data. This is going to rock the business intelligence market.

SOA, Web 2.0, Mashup, Enterprise 2.0, Web Services

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